Notion: The Ultimate Note-Taking App
Notion (iPhone, Android) is a popular note-taking and organization app that offers a wide range of features for personal, professional, and academic purposes. The app’s advanced style, block, embed, and attachment options allow users to create detailed notes with various elements like block equations, calendar view, web bookmarks, and graph options. Notion integrates with various apps like GitHub, Figma, Loom, Adobe XD, Slack, and Zoom, making it easy to embed content from third-party resources into your notes. The app’s interface is intuitive, allowing users to take notes, format, and organize them with ease. Notion also offers notifications, enabling users to receive reminders from their to-do lists and planners. The app syncs across browsers, Mac, and Windows.
Subscription Tiers for Notion
Notion offers three subscription tiers:
- Plus: $4.99/month or $49.99/year
- Notion AI Core: $4.99/month or $49.99/year
- Plus & Notion AI: $9.99/month or $99.99/year
The Plus subscription offers features like unlimited file uploads, collaboration with 100 guests, site customizations, and 30-day page history. The Notion AI Core subscription provides access to the app’s AI assistant, which can help improve writing and answer queries. The Plus & Notion AI subscription includes the Plus features along with advanced AI features like meeting notes, research mode, and enterprise search.
Todoist: Task Management for Productivity
Todoist (iPhone, Android) is a task manager that helps users organize their schedule, track tasks, and note all their projects in one neat planner. The app offers a range of templates for work, personal, and other productivity purposes, making it easy to create detailed task management layouts. Todoist is well-optimized for mobile devices and syncs seamlessly across browsers, iPad, Apple Watch, Wear OS, and tablets. The app offers Siri support for iPhone and widgets for both iPhone and Android. Users can track their daily goals by completing tasks every day and earn “Karma” points to level up their productivity.
Subscription Tiers for Todoist
Todoist offers two subscription tiers:
- Pro: $3/month or $30/year
- Business: Custom pricing for teams
The Pro subscription offers features like setting reminders and deadlines, inviting up to five people for collaboration, building 150 custom views for filters, and using eight themes. The app also offers backup data and a calendar layout and task durations.
Productive: Habit Tracking for Daily Progress
Productive (iPhone, Android) is a free habit tracker that helps users build a sustainable routine from scratch. The app focuses on habit management through daily, time-based habits spread on a weekly calendar view. Users can log or skip habits every day with simple swipe gestures and see their routine progress with a productivity tracker that levels up as they build habits. Productive offers a premium subscription, which includes features like unlimited habits and challenges, location-based reminders, stats, and weekly data, and habit trends.
Finch: Gamified Self-Care and Motivation
Finch (iPhone, Android) is a motivation app that gamifies self-care and productivity. The app allows users to raise a virtual pet through goal completion and quests, providing a fun and immersive experience. Finch’s gamified concept is helpful for users who enjoy apps that gamify productivity and repeat tasks. The app offers a Plus subscription, which includes features like access to all exercises and mailbox content, better deals on shop items, tag emojis, shuffle prompts, and dailyBean rewards.
DailyBean: Simple Journaling for Mental Wellbeing
DailyBean (iPhone, Android) is a simple journaling app that helps users record and monitor their daily mood and productivity. The app uses cute icons (beans) to log daily mood for the day and offers a variety of icons to choose from. DailyBean offers a Premium Pass subscription, which includes features like in-depth analysis of daily life, device sync, ad-free editing, and picture recording. The app also provides sleep analysis, mood by sleep, exercise analysis, and several icons and themes.
Focus To-Do: Handy Pomodoro Timer for Task Completion
Focus To-Do (iPhone, Android) is a productivity app that brings a to-do list and reminders to your focus sessions. The app offers features like events, tasks, projects, and tags for organizing tasks, along with allotting timers to each task, due dates, reminders, and repeats. The app’s Pomodoro timer is a neat, distraction-free one, with timer and fullscreen modes, white noise options, and Strict Mode to enable app blocking and exit prohibition. Focus To-Do offers a Premium subscription, which includes features like Strict Mode, unlimited projects, tags, calendar view, cloud backup and device sync, and custom Pomodoro timers.
Structured: All-in-One Planner and Calendar
Structured (iPhone, Android) is an all-in-one planner, calendar, and habit tracker that helps users visualize their schedule. The app’s core feature is a visual timeline, which strings daily tasks together in a chronological order. Tasks can be recorded and organized neatly in the app’s inbox with colors, time, subtasks, and notes. Structured’s interface design makes it easy to navigate between the calendar, timeline, and inbox. The Pro subscription offers features like calendar import (iCloud, Google, Outlook), reminder sync (Apple Reminders, Outlook), recurring tasks, custom alerts, and AI assistant: Custom schedules built through prompts.
Spotify + YT Premium: Music Streaming for Productivity
Something that can’t be emphasized enough is the importance of a solid work playlist to help users power through mundane tasks. A premium subscription for a music streaming app that skips ads has been a must for many productivity enthusiasts. Spotify Premium (iPhone, Android) is a popular choice for creating ad-free work playlists, while YouTube Premium (iPhone, Android) offers lo-fi streams and YouTube-only releases that are perfect for focus sessions. Both apps offer AI-powered playlists, allowing users to create custom productivity playlists in seconds.
